Fight the Treatment Industrial Complex

AFSC-Arizona staff are amazing advocates for prisoners - and as such, are true blessings to our communities. Spend time on their site - lots of resources.

RUSTBELT RADIO

NATIVE RESISTANCE AND THE CARCERAL STATE

Retiring Arizona Prison Watch...

This site was originally started in July 2009 as an independent endeavor to monitor conditions in Arizona's criminal justice system, as well as offer some critical analysis of the prison industrial complex from a prison abolitionist/anarchist's perspective. It was begun in the aftermath of the death of Marcia Powell, a 48 year old AZ state prisoner who was left in an outdoor cage in the desert sun for over four hours while on a 10-minute suicide watch. That was at ASPC-Perryville, in Goodyear, AZ, in May 2009.

Marcia, a seriously mentally ill woman with a meth habit sentenced to the minimum mandatory 27 months in prison for prostitution was already deemed by society as disposable. She was therefore easily ignored by numerous prison officers as she pleaded for water and relief from the sun for four hours. She was ultimately found collapsed in her own feces, with second degree burns on her body, her organs failing, and her body exceeding the 108 degrees the thermometer would record. 16 officers and staff were disciplined for her death, but no one was ever prosecuted for her homicide. Her story is here.

Marcia's death and this blog compelled me to work for the next 5 1/2 years to document and challenge the prison industrial complex in AZ, most specifically as manifested in the Arizona Department of Corrections. I corresponded with over 1,000 prisoners in that time, as well as many of their loved ones, offering all what resources I could find for fighting the AZ DOC themselves - most regarding their health or matters of personal safety.

I also began to work with the survivors of prison violence, as I often heard from the loved ones of the dead, and learned their stories. During that time I memorialized the Ghosts of Jan Brewer - state prisoners under her regime who were lost to neglect, suicide or violence - across the city's sidewalks in large chalk murals. Some of that art is here.

In November 2014 I left Phoenix abruptly to care for my family. By early 2015 I was no longer keeping up this blog site, save occasional posts about a young prisoner in solitary confinement in Arpaio's jail, Jessie B.

I'm deeply grateful to the prisoners who educated, confided in, and encouraged me throughout the years I did this work. My life has been made all the more rich and meaningful by their engagement.

I've linked to some posts about advocating for state prisoner health and safety to the right, as well as other resources for families and friends. If you are in need of additional assistance fighting the prison industrial complex in Arizona - or if you care to offer some aid to the cause - please contact the Phoenix Anarchist Black Cross at PO Box 7241 / Tempe, AZ 85281. collective@phoenixabc.org

Monday, March 31, 2014

Supporting detainees and their families while rejecting Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

(edited 5am 4/1/14)

As noted in a recent post, I appreciate the critiques that have been shared with me about
immigration reform and indigenous rights in response to my uncritical coverage of the Puente hunger strike. I was directed to some
pointed blog posts that examine the movement for ComprehensiveImmigration Reform from an indigenous perspective. The posts
themselves, as well as the ensuing dialogue, were really helpful in
explaining exactly what CIR is and how it may affect people
indigenous to the border region. These are the most pertinent
ones:

The
ensuing
conversation around the hunger strike and the potential it could
reinforce passage of horrible legislation like CIR also reminded me that
as much as I like to
think I understand indigenous concerns, I really have
no clue. I have no idea what it means to feel a sacred connection to
land tended to by generations of my people - “mypeople”
are
the ones who immigrated here in droves and appropriated pretty much
everything they came across on this continent for themselves and their
heirs.
What I’m so quick to offer to share with the world became “mine”
only by way of genocidal practices and continued colonization of this
region by my ancestors. Those ancestors aren’t all from the 19th
century, either - it includes my beloved grandparents from Iowa, who
helped settle Sun City in the 1970’s with the kind of nice old
folks who perpetrate unspeakable violence on oppressed communities by
voting for men like Joe Arpaio. Because they were here, my mother and
I came and settled out here, too.

Deeper
in my genes I found the Pilgrims and Mormons - the leaders among them, even. Some people take pride in such
heritage - my mother and grandmother even joined the Mayflower Society. I was
mortified by what I found in my family tree, however - like the eyewitness account of William Bradford, first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, narrating and justifying the brutal slaughter of the Pequot in 1637. The ancestor that qualifies me as a
“Daughter of the American Revolution” (should I choose to join)
fathered another prominent settler, Brigham Young, responsible for
considerable harm to indigenous people. And I grew up in the US Army,
raised by a military intelligence officer who spent his life fighting
Communism in other lands...really, as a kid I was pretty
well-indoctrinated with the notion that the descendants of this
nation’s founders had a special duty to rule the world, since only
we could do it right. So, I guess it’s no wonder that as much as I
try to shake my settler mentality, I both identify with the immigrant story
and think that this territory I’ve come to inhabit is something
that I have the right to even consider “sharing”. That was something of an awakening, realizing how entrenched that mindset is.

My
angst
about my family's legacy of colonization and complicity in genocide is
for
another post, though. This one is mostly to clarify what I think are a
couple of factual errors about the hunger strike itself, and explain my
support for the families and prisoners on strike, as well as my thoughts on the upcoming walk to Eloy.

I had several conversations with Puente
members this week about the criticisms that have been shared with me
of the current immigrant rights movement in general, some of which
seemed clearly directed at their group in particular (though Puente
wasn’t identified by name in all the posts), which I summarize
here. My take on the "Trail to end detentions" evolved as I worked on this post, so there are several concerns I have not yet discussed with Puente members or organizers.

Carlos Garcia, Puente's director,
was out of town last week and I didn't ask people to articulate the
organization's position in his absence - this post really just deals
with the opinions of the friends I have who are a part of the Puente community.I
do hope to have a conversation with Carlos
in the next few weeks: I'd like to hear his thoughts on the criticisms of
indigenous activists who have raised them, as I believe those voices
are vital to the dialogue about CIR and both migrant justice and
indigenous rights.

From
my experience, Puente is driven by its
members’ needs and wants and willingness to work. Most of those members are people who have been directly affected by
arrest and criminalization, detention or deportation. Yes,
Puente is allied with Dreamers, but most of the people I know
from Puente have loved ones who fail to fit into the neat “Dreamer”
or “model immigrant” packages, and are disillusioned with what is really Comprehensive Immigration Reform, (CIR). Even if passed
today and signed into law, the CIR proposal offered by the Senate and celebrated by
organizations like The National
Council of LaRaza and Fast 4
Families won’t improve the very real and desperate circumstances
they face right now. For many the passage of CIR will only make their
long “path to citizenship” more precarious, if not impossible.
That's why they aren't fighting for CIR to be resurrected and passed
in the House.

Puente members'
concerns about the criminalized migrants they love were marginalized
pretty quickly early on; this si their push-back. I hope in the process of doing so, they help
humanize other criminalized groups in this state as well, and shed
light on the inherent violence of imprisonment and inhumanity of
exile from one's family and community, whatever the reason such
penalty is imposed. I do hope the families of AZ DOC prisoners take
note and organize to fight back against the system, too –
together, you could have so much power.

As
for the pro-CIR organizations capitalizing on the
attention Puente and similar actions around the country got: its my understanding
that some tried their best to discourage Puente from that plan in
the first place. While the Not1More
campaign that Puente's hunger strike hashtagged under is run by the
National Day Labor Organizing
Network, that particular action at ICE in Phoenix wasn’t
planned by NDLON or Dreamers as a stunt to promote CIR. It originated
in the anguish of an area mother who decided to fast for her son's
liberation, as every other attempt to free him had failed. This
mother knew she couldn’t sit around and wait for CIR to help her -
if anything, the passage of CIR would assure his permanent
deportation.

The
other
family members of prisoners facing deportation – most of whom
had criminal records - organized around her, as did their loved ones
in detention. As I understand it, that was part of an escalating
campaign to push back
against the national CIR promotions that threatened the many Puente
members already affected by criminalization. Here in Arizona that's
especially common
because of racial profiling (not just by Arpaio's people, either) and
Maricopa County Attorney Bill
Montgomery's decision to charge people arrested in workplace raids
with as many felonies as possible - a practice Puente
has drawn attention to and challenged more aggressively than
anyone else in the community.

CCA
and ICE weren’t behind the release of Arturo Castenada, the one
prisoner who was set
free at the end of the strike, either - though it would have been
a brilliant strategy, if they had been. The community had just finally
managed to raise enough to bond him out. None of the prisoners in question have been released due
to the hunger strike, in fact – and I'm not sure anyone really expected that
they would be; they must have anticipated the probability of
retaliation instead.

And
indeed, there were consequences. Prisoner organizers were placed in
solitary and threatened with tube-feeding if a hunger strike dragged
on. In fact, one hunger striker behind bars, Jaime
Valdez, was deported in the middle of the 9th night, at the same
time as the encampment at ICE was raided and the
organizers on site were jailed. Despite
Jaime’s
deportation, the same families and prisoners continue to
agitate.

Now,
honestly, I personally don't think that militarizing the border and offering migrants a "path to citizenship" - even if the path really led there - is the best solution for millions of people being forced
from their homelands due to poverty and our exploitation of their
labor, violence from the war on drugs, fallout from our decades-old
war on communism, and so on – but then, I reject borders and
nation-states in the first place, and advocate the overthrow of
capitalism as the best solution to many of our social ills. I'd like to
see more local energy go into stopping further colonization, abolishing
the
border altogether, overturning
NAFTA/aborting the TPP, and halting the development of the Sun
Corridor – a critical piece of the CANAMEX
superhighway which, along with CIR, will make the
extraction of indigenous resources and the exploitation of desperate
workers throughout the hemisphere all the more efficient - and destructive - in years to
come. That would promote both migrant justice and indigenous rights.

Saying
all
that to detainees and their families in the middle of this struggle,
though, is like talking
prison abolition to prisoners who have been repeatedly assaulted in
custody and are trying to get to safety, or who are dying for lack of
medical attention – my ideal may be a great objective, but it doesn't
help
them survive the here and now. My role in relation to
prisoners and their families when they fight the state on their own
terms tends to be supportive - at the very least, I dont try to re-direct their actions or help the state invisibilize them. Rather, when prisoners and their families take action to make themselves seen and
heard, they get my attention and respect - even if I dont completely agree with them. I hope they get yours as
well.

The Puente members I've
met over the past few years are sincere, earnest people fighting
incredible odds to reduce criminalization and incarceration while
offering real support to prisoners and their families - that's where we
connect the most, of course. Those who are fasting
and walking and fighting today's deportation machineas best they can deserve better than to be dismissed as pawns or demonized as
collaborators because the pro-CIR movement has exploited or tried to
co-opt their actions. Nor is it necessarily their fault that the organization
which has helped amplify their voices has such a complicated history and politic.

That said, the organization Puente is still fair game for criticism.I have issues with the name of this weeks' journey to Eloy ("Trail to End Deportations"), which seems to compare the experience of migrants with an explicitly genocidal forced march of indigenous people across the country so Anglos (from earlier generations of immigrants and colonizers) could claim their resources. It does seems to confirm that the struggle of the indigenous people from this region really doesn't register when Puente plans actions around immigration reform; I don't know how else to explain that.

And I have yet to hear a competing proposal for immigration reform - they wont advocate for CIR, as I explained, but I haven't heard anything from the organization taking a stand explicitly against it; it seems as if this campaign is limited to getting a stay for as many people as possible until CIR is passed, and wont address the other areas of concern raised by indigenous activists. So I am conflicted again. I need to know more.

Whatever the White House does in the meantime, I see Congress at the end of this journey (during the height of the election season) taking up CIR and tweaking it a little to appease the Latino voting block, and maybe add a few more billion to border militarization without the national immigrant rights groups batting an eye...and that troubles me. I have to agree with my indigenous comrades on this - I think we need to do everything we can to stop anything like CIR from passing. The Trail to end Deportations and the Not1More campaign is leading straight to CIR, regardless of whether or not it succeeds in its immediate aims.

I'll
let you know what I learn when I drop in on the walk to Eloy, and maybe
have a chance to chat with Puente organizers a little more. They will
be leaving Wednesday morning at 9am from ICE, and rallying Saturday at
10am in front of the Eloy Detention Center.